


Paper Flowers, The Palest Pink

by atomicsupervillainess



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Best Man Mack, Captain Coulson marrying folk, Dystopian space wedding, F/M, Fitzsimmons getting hitched, Fitzsimmons wedding, Flint is favourite space orphan, Fluff, May is gonna be so pissed that she missed seeing her shield kids tie the knot, Philinda - Freeform, Wedding decorator mack, adopt him coulson, adopt him now, hopeful, post 5.07, served straight up, well-meaning asshole deke who doesn't get the fuss over weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 03:40:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13286235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atomicsupervillainess/pseuds/atomicsupervillainess
Summary: In a slightly rushed fashion, on a shabby, falling apart rust-bucket of a mineral trawler, Fitzsimmons and the team prepare. Hurtling toward the surface of a broken earth, Daisy and Elena make paper flower bouquets. Mack hangs aluminum strips like tinsel, and Coulson pens words for a ceremony two life-times in the making. Deke doesn't understand all the fuss.





	Paper Flowers, The Palest Pink

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notthestupidcatagain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notthestupidcatagain/gifts), [memorizingthedigitsofpi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/memorizingthedigitsofpi/gifts).



> Just when I think I'm out, this show pulls me back in! Have some shabby-ass space wedding fluff that I just couldn't stop myself from writing!
> 
> HAPPY 2018, FITZSIMMONS FAM! 
> 
> Oh, also, Y'all, listen to Allman Brown's Fields of England when reading the ceremony. Trust.

Jemma Simmons knew how to sew. She had learned on flesh before she’d ever practiced on fabric. She had sewn more wounds than seams, but, she thought, reflecting on it now, that it was much the same.

Flint passed her the scraps salvaged from the gauzy fabric of her pale blue slave wardrobe. He had excellent spatial awareness. He’d sketched a pattern with a quick eye, and had set to it with a small, shy smile, eager to be of use.

It struck her, making a tight, neat seam in the fabric that had once been a mark of her subjugation, that it felt a lot like suturing a wound. She was taking something painful, and turning it into something that would heal. She sewed quickly, steadily.

Daisy, feet splayed out in the cargo hold of the trawler beside her, worked slow. Her fingers were careful, but she bit her lip, fighting her inherent clumsiness with the delicate thing. Catching Jemma staring at her, she grinned, light in her eyes, and leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead. “It’s gonna be beautiful.”

Flint nodded, a timidness running through his wiry frame. “I did my best. It’s not what my mom would have been able to do, but…” He shrugged, self-deprecating. “I did my best.”

Jemma reached out a hand. “It’s lovely. I couldn’t ask for better.”

He smiled in earnest, and so did she, a tiny tear suddenly spilling out of the corner of her eye. “Oh this simply won’t do.” She giggled, wiping it away. “I have a wedding dress to finish sewing.”

* * *

 

“--sure, she didn’t hear it. And it’s good for vows.” Elena declared, cutting out scraps of paper in the shape of flowers.

“My man, you cannot reuse material. It’s your wedding. Come on, I know you got a poet’s heart in there. Just say something meaningful.” Mack said, tacking up thin lines of shiny aluminum sheeting to the rusted-out wall panels.

“I don’t think you quite understand, Mack -- It took me seventy-four years to come up with that.” Fitz let his head drop heavily onto the crate he was using as a table, scribbling out tiny print in a little notebook.

“Come on, Fitz, it can’t be that bad.”

“It can. It is. It took three months for me to find the right words to say to her when we first knew each other. I stumbled all over them too. There’s just something about her that trips me up. And it’s everything - it’s, erm, it’s my heart, my tongue, my mind. She just -- ensnares me, you know? It’s like I just stick and cocoon around her. Like a chrysalis. No, that’s not quite it. I don’t -- see? She spins me about. Just like this. It’s like -- I know gravity. I know how I orbit in the world, but it’s her -- she’s the only thing I always circle back to. It’s impossible not to. She’s like a planetary body. Like earth -- earth that was, earth we’ll make whole again. Somehow. She’s this heavenly body, this celestial thing, the only home I’ve ever really known. That doesn’t make any sense, I know. She just… she makes me feel safe and scared all at the same time, and I just can’t figure out how to say it with any eloquence. I could build it. I can’t say it. Not just like that.”

Mack was staring at Elena with soft eyes. “I dunno. That sounded fine to me.”

Elena cleared her throat. She wasn’t looking at Fitz either. “Yeah. That sounds good to me too.”

Their fingertips intertwined for a moment.

“What did I say again?” Fitz begged, brows tented and eyes wild at the corners, hair mussed from running his hands through it in desperation.

Elena sighed and rolled her eyes. “Okay smart-man. Let’s take it from the top, before you hurt yourself. You talk and I write.”

Mack chuckled, stringing some of the paper flowers onto little wires he rigged to the ceiling.

* * *

 

Coulson understood the impetuousness of the whole production. Hell, he welcomed it. It gave him something to think about, aside from the blown-out husk of an earth looming below, the alien smack-down above, and May, somewhere on the surface. Injured. Possibly dead.

Coulson shook the foolishness from his head. Not his May.

_May._

It was an unlikely daydream. Just a tendril, really, drifting under the door he’d built in his mind around what was and what could be. He could smell her hair. Somewhere in his lizard brain, the scent was locked away. Clean, subtle, like Ylang Ylang, with a little citrus underneath it.

Coulson sighed, pinching his brows, and stood. He had died. He had come back to life, and the first thing he had thought about was her. When he thought of life, he thought of May.

He ambled toward the wide windows of the captain’s quarters, his unofficial home for the time being, until they reached the surface, and either saved the world, or died trying.

Again.

Absently, he fiddled with his pen, and wondered. If he died, would the scent of her hair bring him back? The gentleness behind her dark eyes? The feel of her hand in his? The warmth of her skin? Would she be the thing that called him back to life again?

He stared at the surface, slowly coming into view.

Coulson knew, of course. It was an unspoken pull from life, an impassioned cry against an indifferent universe. It was implacable and unrelenting, the way life and love bound people up. He’d seen it growing, felt the ivy lengths of it unfurl and crawl around their feet on the bus. Felt it stretch to hydra, and then stiffen and parch in the drought that followed, until it peeled back to reveal the green, unyielding wick beneath.

That green, growing, living thing, it had curled around Fitz and coiled into a steely strength in her disappearance. It had been the line Jemma clung to, a galaxy away and losing hope. It had been the lifeline that had led them back to each other.

It amplified, it strengthened, it nourished. It turned them into the people they were meant to be.

He placed the paper on the window, eyes gazing longingly at the grey husk that had been earth, and began to write.

He thought about May, and he let that tiny green shoot curl around the words in his mind. He wrote what he wanted someone to say when they stood together, hand in hand, stubbornly alive and in love.

Maybe. Maybe someday.

May, be baby? _Nah_. That pun was too cheesy, even for him.

 

* * *

 

“You do realize that we’ve used up five rolls of emergency sheeting. You know that the aluminum is meant for more than just some space-shiny pretty thing, right? You get that it’s --”

“Conductive couplet sheeting, for when we inevitably run into an electrical issue on this rusted out bucket. Yeah, we get it. We’ll get it back in order after.”

“You know paper just doesn’t grow on trees, right? Not any more, not since you went all --” Deke mimed an explosion with his hands, sound effects included.

“Considering I got shunted seventy-four years into the future before that ever happened, I’m gonna keep adamantly denying that I destroyed anything. Plus, where are your facts coming from? Because I’ve got two words for you - _fake news_.”

“Regardless, what the hell use are a bunch of paper flower streamers? Why did we waste good duct tape on a bouquet of paper flowers made from ship manifests?”

Deke took a deep breath to carry on his harshly whispered rant, but Daisy was looking at Fitz. He stood in the middle of the room, his heel bouncing. His neckerchief was tied loosely around his collar to approximate an old world tie, and his errant curls were smoothed down as best as they could get in the dry, recycled air of the trawler. He wore a vest they’d managed to liberate from one of the chests in the cargo hold.

Deke swept his gaze up the jittery man. He was hardly the image of the terrifying Boshtok the Maurauder, now, to see what was capturing Daisy’s attention.

Fitz pawed at his beard.

Deke remembered about an hour before this drastically boring, drawn out moment, Fitz had been soliciting opinions on whether or not he should shave. Elena had spirited the razor he held, tremblingly in his bad hand, to some unknown place.

“Listen, Quakey-pants, I know you’re used to a resource-rich world where oxygen was just made magically from the plants, where the sky was blue and there was grass, and humans were free and crap, but here, in the _present_ era, none of that exists.”

From behind him the hydraulic slide of a door sounded. Footsteps slipped in, quiet and  measured, with a certainty in their gait.

“What _does_ exist is a resource shortage, a human race inches from extinction, a militarized galactic response to an already beat-down species just trying to survive, and a handful of idealistic idiots spending goods like there were so many damn tokens to go around, in some futile and pointless old ritual that amounts to literally nothing.” he gestured around in a tamped down manner, trying to keep relatively under the radar of the proceedings.

It seemed to be working too well.

She still wasn’t looking at him. He blamed her short attention span on that 21st century device overload he’d heard about. Twenty seconds at most, that’s what the really old folk used to joke about. But…

Her eyes were getting glassy, watching Fitz. Her bottom lip quivered, and she sucked it into her mouth, biting down, stifling some emotion he couldn’t place. “These days,” He whispered a little louder, stepping closer so he could say it into her ear and know she’d really heard it, “People just shack up together, until they don’t any more. Life’s short, tokens are tight, and there’s not enough of anything to go around.”

“Shut up,” She hissed, her head turning away from him, tears dripping like a soft rain from her lashes. She brought her finger-tips to her mouth.

“I’m just saying, why the hell waste it on some meaningless ceremony? Weddings ceased being a real thing even before my grandparents shacked up.”

Daisy groaned, shot him a withering look, and then set her mouth into a firm line. Her hands went to the sides of his face, forcibly twisting his head to watch as the gossamer blue silk and satin misted out like a cloud around Jemma’s knees.

Daisy dragged his head up to the silly bouquet of manifest flowers clutched, white-knuckled in Jemma’s hands. There was something about the way the print overlapped print, something about the fragility of the duct tape stems, and the way the orange halogen bulb’s copper-rose light filtered through the thin paper that made it look the palest pink.

Over the tinny audiocom system, a scratchy tune trickled through the dented metal walls, tinkling along in oddly placed echoes. Flint jogged back from the nav deck, his skipping step skidding to a stop in front of Jemma.

“I heard you tell Daisy you wished you could have gotten married in England. It’s not exactly England, but it was the best I could do.” He tilted his head shyly to the side.

“Oh, bless.” Jemma said. Daisy didn’t need to direct his gaze any more. The gauzy, sheer panels of fabric that had been the sleeves of her slaves’ garments now adorned her hair, loosely braided into her crown in a shimmery veil, softening her already soft features, like something out of an impressionist painting. It was like something from the framework -- like something from a dream. The gentle brushstroke of her pink mouth pressed together, stoppering the swell of emotion, Just like Daisy.

Deke glanced around. Mack was openly weeping where he stood, tall, behind Fitz. His face scrunched. He was an ugly crier.

Even Elena, tough as nails, was red eyed. A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

Daisy dropped her hands from his shoulders as she went over to Jemma’s side, wrapping Jemma’s hand around her bicep.

Something silent seemed to pass between them, teary, close-lipped smiles, and one clipped nod after the other.

The music seemed to fill the small chamber. The slide of guitar strings were plucked and strummed in such a sweet, nostalgic way that it caused something to prick behind his eyes. His throat suddenly felt a bit constricted, like he was about to sneeze, or cough. But not cry.

Weddings were outdated anyways. A pointless waste of resources.

Deke cleared his throat, and adjusted his stance, suddenly feeling ill at ease. The prickling moved from behind his eyes down his throat, tickling his hands with restlessness. He clasped them in front of himself, just to quiet the antsy feeling that overtook him.

He watched Daisy.

He watched the way she glided up the makeshift aisle, staring between her two friends, her face an open window of sorrow and happiness. Instead of the usual fierce mask she wore, it was like she was naked, stripped bare and truthful, her mouth both a smile and a frown. Her eyes were wide and glassy with unshed tears. Coulson shook his head with pride, a small, fatherly smile hanging like an ornament on his mouth.

There was so much open-hearted emotion filling the small cabin, it was like he was drowning in it.

His vision seemed to swim, but he blinked it away. It was just contact-emotion. Like a contact-high, except, instead of feeling numbed out, everything felt more, felt heightened, felt huge, felt important.

He looked to Fitz.

That this stringy, anxious, trembling man (whose one hand shook with such a tremor that it made Deke wonder if he’d gotten the shaking sickness early) could be the same Boshtok the Marauder he’d heard tales about all his life -- it seemed nothing more than a fiction. That the self-same, scared, hard-breathing fool in love, who seemed to trip over his own words as much as his soon-to-be wife’s, was the prophesied saviour of the human race, seemed even more of a fiction.

He looked like a man. Just a man. Just a fool of a man, desperately, fiercely, reverently in love. His eyes gazed at the woman in blue adoringly, his brows pulled up taut in longing. His mouth dropped open in wonderment.

Deke looked again at Jemma.

Under the veil, she looked like something from Manet. Some soft impressionist thing, smudged in pastel colours and flowing lines. But the veil did not hide the truth about her.

She looked like a woman. Just a woman. Not art. Pretty, sure, if you liked that pale  long-facedness. If someone built like a bird was your thing.

He found his gaze shifting back to Daisy, to the lustre of her black hair, the coppery tones the orange halogen painted on her tawny skin.

 

* * *

 

Coulson was saying words. Jemma heard them, they swam into her consciousness, and then flowed past. The undertow of the moment pulled her inexorably to Fitz. He was the only solid thing in her vision. Everything else seemed muted, washed in rust and copper, tarnished in a patina of age, like seventy-four years, oxidized and washed by time and tides and distance, by everything that had ever held them apart. But his eyes were blue, and they called her home. Like a rust red sea, everything that weighed them down, bloodied them, wounded them, seemed to part, and make way.

There was only one path, one horizon, and it led to him. It had always led to him.

Her feet padded forward, her eyes trained on that homeward blue.

Her breath caught in her throat, faint and hard and ragged, like she had swam ninety feet to breach this surface.

Daisy stammered, voice thick, “I do - give her away, I mean,”

Fitz’s hand shook terribly as he reached for the circle of tin that Flint pulled from his pocket. He caught Jemma’s eyes looking at it, in silence, and a small fragment of shame passed behind his eyes. That too, had been something they’d crossed. Jemma surged forward, shameless, reaching for him.

In the palm of his quavering hand, he held out the ring he’d made. There was, inset and centred, a tiny pockmarked rock, coloured in shades of scorched blue. It was a piece of asteroid. That too, had stretched between them. Space had hollowed her out, humbled her, and cored the hope from inside her. It had made her hate the colour blue, until she saw the shade of his eyes again -- until it became the colour of her hopes, once more.

Time, and tides, and the wideness of the ever expanding universe. Something about the defiance of love, the doggedness and unflinching drive of love -- Coulson’s words floated in and out of her focus.

But she thought, no, it was this. It was this that drove them.

It was the seam of a dress, sewn from slaves’ clothes. It was the way they were both wounded, but still -- intertwined, fingers interlaced, hearts together -- were healing. It was the years, side by side, and so far apart, and still, never alone. It was that special yearning that bowed his lips, softened the corners of his eyes -- it was how he looked at her, like she brought him peace.

That was what it was.

 

* * *

 

He was crying, but so was Mack, so he didn’t even try to hide the steady trickle out of the corner of his eye. His head tilted, taking in the vision of pale blue and filmy white that stood before him, looking at him -- looking through him, with this lop-sided, adoring smile tugging on the corner of her soft, pink mouth.

His mouth trembled, like his hand, and his heart, and his breathing. He was nothing but a tremoring mass of jelly and feeling.

Fitz lifted her veil, and his breath caught in his throat. He was overwhelmed by her. Not just her beauty -- she was always beautiful, and he’d never be quite used to it. No, it was the fervent, warm, willing want in her glassy eyes.

Desire.

Love.

Unabashed and absolute, it crashed over him like a tidal wave, punching the breath from his chest and making him crumple within, making him question whether or not he was worthy of it, good enough for it -- and then she stepped forward, interlaced her fingers with his in a fierce grip, and pressed certainty into his palm.

He squeezed hers back, and nodded imperceptibly, determination steeling him.

“I do. I always will,” She squeaked, nodding, tears in her voice, barely able to speak the words. They both giggled, nervously, happily.

“Leopold Fitz, do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do you part?”

“I do. Jemma, darling, I take you as my partner in life and my one true love, across time, across galaxies, from the bottom of the ocean to the end of the earth, the universe and curses be damned. I will cherish you a-and”

His voice broke here, but he soldiered on, “- and I will love you more each day than I did the day before. I trust you and I respect you, and I will laugh with you and cry with you, loving you faithfully through good times and bad, regardless of the obstacles we face -- we’ll face them together. I give you my hand, and --” The tears took him, and he pressed a palm to his eyes and groaned, clearing his throat.

“And I give you my heart, and all of my love, from this day forward for as long as we both shall live.”

“You may kiss t--”

Coulson was cut off by Jemma surging forward, reaching, on tiptoes, around Fitz’s neck.

Their lips met, tentatively at first, like lifetimes spent sleeping were unfurling into wakeful bloom -- beneath his hands he felt her shudder and pulled her closer, the satiny material slipping beneath his palm, causing him to grip her to him fiercely. Fitz tilted his head, slotting his lips against her mouth, sliding his tongue over the tip of hers, slipping inside for the first time in two lifetimes, and felt more than heard, the growl roll in his throat.

She clung to him like a wave breaking, her nails digging furrows through his hair, her thumb painting a hot line down the side of his jaw, petting against his chin and tenderly brushing the bottom of his lip.

She filled his vision. She was all he could see.

Some things never change.

“Doctor Fitzsimmons,” She murmured into his mouth, eyelashes fluttering shut as she leaned in for one more ardent kiss. It was filled with promise and longing, her tongue delving deeply into his mouth, like he was a treasure.

When the kiss broke again, he panted, “Doctor Doctor Fitzsimmons.”

“Come on, we’ve got kids here. Let’s keep this ceremony PG,” Coulson warned, tilting his head in the direction of Flint, who was blushing and giggling off to the side.

“Yeah, save some of that for the honeymoon,” Elena catcalled.

* * *

 

“Still an outdated surface tradition?” Daisy nudged Deke in the ribs, offering him a scrap of fabric.

He dabbed his eyes. “It’s alright, I guess.” He muttered, his voice thick.


End file.
